Heliogabalus: Or, the Crowned Anarchist by Antonin Artaud

Author:Antonin Artaud
Language: eng
Format: epub

3. Anarchy

In 217 at Emesa, Heliogabalus isn’t yet fourteen but has already reached that state of perfect beauty which all the statues of him show us. His flesh is plump as a woman’s, his features waxen-smooth, eyes verging on burnt gold. One senses he will never be very tall, yet he is admirably proportioned, with Egyptian shoulders - broad though sloping, slim hips, a backside not at all protuberant. His hair borders on reddish-blond; his overly white flesh is blue-veined, with here and there in its folds and creases, curious lividities.

In profile his lips lightly pout, like a bottletop. He is not yet as we see him in the Louvre, with that frizzy fluff under his chin like a blond pubic thatch; and above all, the ignoble gob, the breached fellator’s mouth.

His is the apogee of the beauty of the ephebe who’s going to make use of his beauty.

Yet it’s to his mother he owes this brimming femininity, this Venusian impress which even flashes through the flickering fires of the solar tiara he puts on each morning; to his mother, the tart, the prostitute, the harlot who never knew how to do anything else but lend herself to the brutalities of the Masculine. And speaking of Julia Soemia, of the brutalities of the Masculine, by this I mean that Julia Soemia on heat wasn’t constrained by simple epidermal proximities, but would surrender herself through principle, to a notion of ritual, not to the males who wanted her, but to those she chose.

“She lived like a courtesan”, says Lampridius, “unable to resist her whim. And all, down to the lowliest of slaves, would blush at her debaucheries.”

She identifies with Venus, the watery moon, the humid feminine that does not however descend into the dark. Which again is not to say that such ritual identification didn’t prevent her once or twice setting principle aside.

The fact remains that from a sexual point of view Julia Soemia is what’s called ‘a high-class piece’. Of the four Julias, she is physically the most perfect. She meets that canon of slightly heavy feminine beauty established by Albrecht Durer. That’s to say there’s an alchemy in her physique, a thousand years before alchemy.

Solidly built and well-rounded, as we can see from her statues and medallions; her skin amber-coloured, she too with a gold-dust sheen, yet always with that greyish haze making shadow on her skin.

Her insignia is the violet “Ioneh”, the flower of love and sex, because its petals fall apart like a sex. And on her shoulder, the dove “Ionah”.

Like Domna, she gives herself to whoever is of service to her; and knows how to sniff out whoever will serve her turn.

Or rather - and this is what’s remarkable in her case - her loves serve Heliogabalus made, so they seem, to unite with the fame of Heliogabalus, the ephebe she will follow unto death.

This love Heliogabalus more than returns, as an ancient historian Lampridius recognises; he won’t go as far as saying Heliogabalus is a

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